Learning And Leadership For Business Agility, Low Office Productivity, A Look Into Facebook’s Go-To Management Manual And Overcoming Resistance To Change #FridayFinds

Welcome to a new edition of #FridayFinds, where we talk about some of this week’s best articles in HR and business.

Let’s dive right in:

Rethinking Agile: Learning And Leadership For Business Agility

At the inaugural Business Agility Conference in New York, February 2017, organizational consultants, HR experts, and others will explore issues of agile organization design, leadership, HR policies in agile organizations, and business innovation. Angel Diaz-Maroto, Certified Enterprise Coach and Certified Agile Leadership Educator at Agile training and coaching firm Agilar, will also be running a workshop for the Scrum Alliance’s Certified Agile Leadership program.

“Agile is now much more than a revolutionary approach to work for the software development industry. (…) It’s transforming a wide variety of industries and specialties from marketing and human resources to financial services.

(…) Business agility is creating a learning organization that is faster and better at learning about themselves and their customers.”

Only 7 Percent of Office Workers Are Productive (but Most Are Miserable)

A recent FlexJobs survey of 3,100 professionals found that only seven percent reported they were most productive when working in the office. More than 50 percent of respondents said they accomplished more when working from home, while another eight percent cited better productivity at coffee shops, libraries, or co-working spaces.

A growing body of research suggests that remote work helps people be more productive — upending the idea that teams must work together in person for the wheels to turn. More than 80 percent of survey respondents said they would be more loyal to employers if flexibility were an option.

With PwC’s most recent Annual Global CEO Survey revealing that over 70 percent of CEOs identify the “availability of key skills” as one of the top three threats to their companies – an eight-year high for that question – recruiting top talent stands out as a particularly daunting challenge for HR practitioners.

Experience, intelligence, and determination are all important aspects to consider when looking at a job candidate, but the primary focus needs to be on talent, argue Marcus Buckingham and Curt Coffman in their classic management guide, First, Break All the Rules, a book that Facebook HR chief Lori Goler recommends to all new managers. In their book, talent is defined as “a recurring pattern of thought, feeling, or behavior that can be productively applied.”

Overcome Resistance to Change by Enlisting the Right People

Also on the topic of “the right people”, Todd Warner argues that the secret to changing an organization is to understand the fundamental units that make up the social system — local tribes as he calls them— and to invert the change process so that tribes own the change. In his opinion, to influence tribes in organizations, you have to give up control, and recognize that every change always goes through a process of localization as it gets executed.

This isn’t just a “bottom-up” approach instead of a “top-down” one: it is an approach where leaders still lead change, but they work with and through the organization’s tribes to effect it.

Join us next week as we share more of our favorite articles. We’d also love to know what articles made your week and what topics you’d like us to talk about next week so we look forward to reading your comments below!

Paula is a content strategist with a big passion for life and the pursuit of happiness. When she's not creating an eBook or tweeting the latest trends, she's probably petting a cat or watching a movie.